Group recently premiered new song at festival in Finland
Muse love doing everything all at once, and on “Unravelling,” their first new music since 2022’s Will of the People album, they combine EDM synths, melodramatic rock opera vocals, and shit-kicking prog-metal riffs. And somehow it all works in a way that sounds conspicuously like Muse.
The most transcendent moment comes near the end when frontman Matt Bellamy sings, “Feeling the glow die inside of our bones/This is a hymn for our love with no God and no throne,” in an exultant way right before his guitar digs into a nasty metal breakdown that sounds more like Slipknot than Muse. The group has not yet revealed if the song, produced by Dan Lancaster (Bring Me the Horizon, Blink-182), is foreshadowing a larger project.
Muse, which have dates in Europe through July, test-drove the song live at a tour warmup gig at Helsinki’s House of Culture last week. They gave it a bigger premiere on June 14, though, when they performed it at Finland’s Rockfest for an audience of more than 50,000 people. The song’s producer, Lancaster, plays keys and additional live guitar at Muse’s live performances.
A few years ago, when they were still promoting Will of the People, Muse showed fans just how deeply they could blend genres when they flipped Paul McCartney’s “Live and Let Die” into the ultra-metallic original song, “Kill or Be Killed.” “‘Kill or Be Killed’ is Muse at their heaviest,” Bellamy said then. “We wanted to update our hard rock sound on this album, and with ‘Kill or Be Killed’ we found a modern metal sound featuring double-bass drum action and even a death growl. Lyrically the song takes influence from my favorite Paul McCartney song ‘Live and Let Die,’ a dark take on how life’s adversity can sometimes bring out the worst human instincts to survival at any costs.”
